


Boston in Your Life (Freedom)

by trailingviolets



Category: Original Work
Genre: Discovery, F/F, Friendship/Love, Lesbian Character, Love Confessions, Passion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-06
Updated: 2013-07-06
Packaged: 2017-12-17 22:13:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/872530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trailingviolets/pseuds/trailingviolets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loving classmates afraid to commit, an errant wild animal, an unexpected storm, the warmth of human skin...<br/>If Monet wrote short stories set in Quincy Boston.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boston in Your Life (Freedom)

Intro-  
Aching, bitter winds follow an ancient course along the waterline, a path ripe with New England seal tank, distinct hankering after fresh blood and strength. Nothing of tea lurks there, scented, anymore. The sheer city towers over all bystanders, mindsets reduced to grain and dust, positively lacking identity.  
This feeling carries inside a great deal of freedom.  
Part One-  
Alice liked to get lost there, past impulses and urges, yearned to move with a crowd, buying food at generic station carts, toting it through the adjacent park, mentally commenting on birdsong. Once, a bird flew clipped and howling, right past an abandoned, speeding taxi before her. Alice felt her pulse involuntarily quicken, and gave up two curling, greasy fries as a reward for such freely given adrenaline. The dove stirred that alive emotion; at least she could keep it literally from starvation, passing away to be scraped off the stones in early morning by foggy, brusque workers.  
Do avian Americans fly upwards in their last reveries? A question belonging in an engraved textbook, it provoked Alice, frowning like she used to in formal class, expensive sweaters always picking her arms.  
Standing alone where so many others milled, danced, conspicuously screwed after parties, hands clasped over mouths, panting, freedom surged strong.  
Alice enjoyed the cotton fabric enfolding her, one of a litter, perfect hoodies wandering the world at large. Spinning around and around established laundries, walking as if animated, making transactions, eating junk food.  
Carmine remembered the feeling of a few particular, exquisite coats, a street to the left, two staircases up and a hard knock to perform. At once the crowd slipped past, leaving Alice alone, slightly chilled and wild-eyed. The odds of understanding her within furtive assemblies, even the one she treasured and worried like a tribe, the odds didn’t favor a lesbian. If calling someone so wasn’t an insult anymore. Maybe society moved on long ago, and Alice wished for a textbook of those moments, bits and pieces later gaining mentions only in stuffy college classrooms, briefly.  
The teacher might stare at notes, befuddled, coffee stains obvious on layered, white shirts exposed by an odd posture. Alice stared at Carmine, eyes glowing, absolved from written words for a moment, lips wet and greedy. Carmine’s teeth moved concentrically, constantly molding cough drops, the angles and whirls hidden between tongue and cheek, then tongue and throat.  
The favorite red hoodie pretended it’s own stomach was fed, when Alice tried on the same habit after school, alone, pressing herself to occupy another personality. She instantly smothered inappropriate laughter, ridiculous in such desperate desire. All laughter seemed eccentric without company, in a crowd of people, each a stranger from every other, company past association.  
Alice’s own textbook contained unbearable, scary voices. Asking unending questions, coming apart from and slowly unwinding her fibers, voices timid and tepid, risking caution, beating against a soft nature.  
Before college in the arena of lonesome winters, Alice wanted two precious gifts, one comfort, a fireplace, kitchen nights and ambient lamps, and another Carmi, unnamed and faceless, then, as if she had yet to live.  
Neither parent thought to inquire, instead buying Egyptian sheets and retreating back towards the Maine wilderness. Dreaming, Alice moved through childhood again, ever present fog, scrubby berries integrated breakfast, lunch, and dinner, dogs following on flat heels. She thought they’d drop a wizened body before a stone bearing Alice Harmon, just a perilous, coasting dove away from the same archaic story played out in Boston, daily.  
Scholarships changed eyes, not lives. Inherently, the plot stayed open.  
Will people enter into forced cremation during the next century? Discuss.  
“When did you start coming here, Alice?”  
“Saturday. I love the birds.” She hid her rampant emotions wrongly.  
“Doves look so elegant, I agree.”  
“Not peaceful though.”  
“No never. That’s a misconception. There’s a situation…” Silence deeper than multi-tipped fantasies. Even Alice stirred helpless; trying to conjure up images of conversations they’d held, usually in front of fireplaces, surrounded by ambient light, all simple daydreams without substance.  
“Would you prefer if I left and found someone else?”  
“Please don’t.”  
“Then…”  
“Yes?”  
“I need assistance. That’s what I came to this park for. There’s no use in staying strangers. Alice, do you see that shop? Someone there might’ve helped me but now I’ve got you, right? Can you come back to the loft?” Panic caught gently in Carmine’s tone.  
“Sure.”  
“Okay, deep breathes. This’ll scare you off forever.” Mastering the Art of French Cooking sat abandoned near the stove, possibly since Alice last bit into a pear, legs wrapped first around the little island table, then Carmine. Sugary fruit, olive oil and spice ingredients, the faintest cough drops reaching through from a kiss beneath her bra clasp. A portrait, transient and painted by everyone she touched. Alice remembered then the power of coming inside, rote heterosexual advances.  
Often, odors communicate enough, and the new scent to the loft, it bloomed rare and different. Caged animals, strip joints, male gyms used for cruising and seldom policed.  
“Where’d you find a raccoon in Boston?”  
“I don’t quite know. Someone swaddled it like their newborn child and left it at the lobby desk, delegated to my floor and my loft. No note, just numbers. What does it even eat?”  
Part Two-  
The scrawny rat hissed. My instincts at the time choked on a return growl.  
“Maybe eggs, salad? This is really strange.”  
“You would know.” Carmi grinned upwards at me, her hair a falling curtain, and motioned for the phone.  
“Game control? Yeah. I want you to hear my newest dependent.”  
The fluff exaggerated a yawn, yipping erratically against the synthetic plastic mouthpiece.  
“Fuck yes, it’s alive. Do you think I recorded Animal Planet?”  
A slight, hellish pause into which she inserted a voice, quivering, “Listen, the pet shop across the block wasn’t open, I have a good friend here, we’re more than ready to follow your directions. Don’t underestimate two loving women, here. I’ve given birth to a proverbial raccoon. I’m attached.”  
She clicked the button to end her connection. “Wash some apples, he says. It’s the important first night.”  
“Who says?”  
“The man I talked with- he promised up and down to come around six and find the little man a new mama. Until then, we’re in charge of this creature. He needs to pull through. End of story.”  
“Right. Sliced?”  
“That’ll work.” Carmine and Alice sat lopsided, weighing down one end of the couch, while the fuzz spat and gulped, working intricate little incisor bones in and out of fruit after fruit. Both humans were deeply involved in separate winding roads, questions and jumping details of lifetime knowledge.  
“You lived in Maine, right, don’t you get these farmland dilemmas?” Finally Alice returned mentally to the room, dimly lit by then.  
“Not at all. It got too cold to see the living things near us most of the time.”  
“March, and God decides to drop me a raccoon.”  
“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other.”  
The wrong start begged to exhaust itself before Alice could clearly think, enough to help their pulsing monster, so much more visceral and threatening than any bird or fish. She imagined once being a lower mammal, black pupils reflecting fierce, wanton consuming. “We met near five fifteen. It’s going on eight thirty. You left the talk go for this long? I thought maybe that night hadn’t happened, or you moved overtly on and I missed the girlfriend memo.” Her face took on a stage of arid hurt, as Carmine eased a long-awaited cherry drop between tooth and gum. Syrup overpowered the animal pheromones.  
“But…” Alice gestured empty-handed. The coon bawled until it held another shining apple, slow bittersweet purrs beginning to fill the silences.  
“I know. Break and the drunken holiday party, we see each other by accident on the street and I press you into helping with all my crazy problems…but what I’ve wanted to say is an urgent, immediate matter. Now or never, and between myself and my logic, you felt the same.”  
The cherry mass resurfaced momentarily, glowing blood red.  
“Firstly, alcohol meant nothing; I didn’t even buy a cocktail.” Deep breaths.  
“I’m moody and pensive, nobody who spends quiet time with me ever wants to again. I aggressively fill every pause with stimulus, questions; ghosts of being human that panicky older adults medicate or smoke away in other cities. Here they drink.” Alice pushed on.  
“Once you’re fairly warned, it stands for me to say: everything I need to live a long and fulfilling life is summed up in our shared kisses. It’s not a morning after insecure betrayal; my body begs to stay near the place where I know you live, where we’ve held conversations and eaten good food. So, I love you.”  
Carmine lunged deftly, at once spreading her legs and bringing Alice up between them.  
“I knew it. I knew so well, the feeling…my mother used to shampoo my hair every Sunday night.” Carmi babbled into heated, cherry kisses. “When you didn’t say anything, after months of class time together, it’s been not even a week and I felt I couldn’t live without you.”  
Alice broke her hair tie, yanking coats off. “For the first few days, I went colorblind.”  
Alice, unmitigated Roman nose, waving red hair, stemmed fingernails, pear-shaped and perpetually underdressed. Carmine, sweet red mouth, hair to her forested cellphone case, stuck precariously onto a belt loop, small and fat, eyes bigger than grapes and finite with brown, some pliant green.  
They waddled to the bed in each other’s arms, irrelevant necklaces stripped down into half shed bras.  
Darkness fell gently, no solstice sunset, a longing lap that circled up into the center of the sky rapidly, engulfing clouds and spilling bright stars. Out of the corner of her vision, Alice watched this, the window framed by romantic, curving glass bottles. The sight at once recalled and awakened unfettered emotions, a bird itself tailing the taste of throaty tears, or so it felt. Carmine kissed and kissed, the beautiful mandalas of wet warmth drip-drying, moving into oblivion under breasts, progressively lower as Logan’s last day flight sailed by. Complete darkness in two minutes, no questions asked.  
It was just beginning to grow in Alice, a lingering, christening moan, soul parceled and dancing, beating against the time played by Carmine’s nipples, tickling her ribs, tongue stair stepping multiple cartilage piercings. The strange notion of her own gutturalness being snatched away, as their lonely coon wailed once forsakenly, Alice’s lips parted in undelivered bliss.  
“Poor baby.” Carmi wrapped a blanket shirt around herself, tossed across the room a silky robe.  
Cranes danced against open, oriental sky prints. Soft, sensual lace enveloped waiting, scarecrow arms. Alice padded gently into the living room.  
“What’s up dogged one? How’s the hound?”  
Part Three-  
Energetic coaxing and praises flattered the coon; he nuzzled and chuffed, chirping a need for close love, intimacy in the freshly frightening dark night.  
Against commands, concerns, against game control and God, Carmi picked up the broken creature, festooned in a skin it could no longer survive, waiting to harshly perish, unable to grasp the concept of never being a fur pelt again, of just ebbing off the planet. Reduced to grain and dust.  
“Are you scared, tonight, little man? Will you sleep for me, Nocturnal?” She spread them out, topless as if to nurse at any moment, should the coon awake a human child, curiously the same in manner and wanting.  
“May I join the family?”  
“You’re his second mama; we’re his only family, together. I’m not sure I want to give this guy up to another woman.” She raised her eyes to meet Alice’s, a radiant smile mocking blatant, heavy tears. The sight inspired so much fondness in Alice.  
“I don’t think I care about sex tonight. Let’s just sit here with our fuzz and be.”  
Her single wretched sob broke, with whispered words. “Love me endlessly.”  
“I do.” They found a position, half leaning on each other, mostly laying, pillows and sheets twisted in protection of the snoring cargo both held, lightly dripping tears from moving R.E.M. eyes.  
“You know everything dreams,” Alice said.  
Part Four-  
“I had an abortion.” Carmi looked past her own withered guilt, for rescuing herself and ending up here, a place signed heaven couldn’t condone or deserve. The kiss Alice administered after spent up five minutes, no tongues, wordless. Connection against the slaughtering night, a pattering slush falling then on slanted roofs, above and below their second floor escape.  
“For a long succession of mornings before dawn, while the rest of the city doesn’t move or mutter, we’ll lay right here and hold a little girl; we’ll raise her to join the rushing crowd. She’ll idolize you for life, with your shampoo and conditioner on Sundays, listening to talk of birds and monsters and darkness.” Alice created a verbal dream out of the moving shadows cars moving up and down the way to Charlestown, to home.  
“And you. Answering her curiosity, vitality, you’ll never grow old and follow hiking trails deep into the mountains, bringing back so many answers she’ll never stop guessing-and thinking.” Spiny, domed caves filled Alice’s vision, and she realized these were her eyelids, heavy, dead set. The last coherent redress on her mind consisted of coonskin hats, the loss of tea in the harbor, as if a colony dumped down into history was forgotten easily, newcomers stepping unfazed around purple, mining, clear water…Commuters, finding peace not from doves but crowds, etched into a bigger being, one day to go down the drain of Boston, setting afterwards in the big, delicious sky each night, an inverted Inferno…  
Part Five-  
Sun gleamed bright past her ginger eyelashes, blinding, a lifelong irritation set to stop as she grayed and only then to turn precious. Next to her own shivering self, Alice noticed sweetly, bare raccoon lying on bare breast; Carmi optimized motherhood overnight, mistrusting of third chances. Contrails of violent struggle ensued, from couch to window to bathroom and back, feet alternately swooping, around unexpected furniture and doors, always leading somewhere else, making genuine progress towards watching again the strange twitch as Carmi subconsciously checked her grip, regularly, thoroughly. It itched of televised miracles.  
Outside, in a haze of alternate slush and sudden snow, nothing whimpered, nothing cried.  
The little man defaulted into their arms for another night, it seemed, freak weather, bad carburetors and old chains. Do all raccoons share in one network of gratification? She started hot chocolate, cubed endless apples. Occasionally, her eyes guiltily trailed to the fireplace, unseen before. Inexplicable tears jounced the cutting board, she had wanted it so. Can two humans... Looking at Carmine, playing lips indicating furious dreams, Alice understood the hunger to try.

**Author's Note:**

> A submission to a writing class I took last semester.  
> It's a very lonely piece, and not for everybody.  
> Still, it needed air.  
> Thanks.


End file.
